


kill your darlings

by notablyindigo



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Fix-it fic, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 13:45:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9274643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notablyindigo/pseuds/notablyindigo
Summary: It had not been a mistake, this life she had chosen. But it had rapidly become one.





	

**Author's Note:**

> In which I, notablyindigo, take a long break from studying about uteri in order to force the narrative the elementary writers have chosen for Joan Watson to make any kind of goddamn sense.

It was only acquaintances who’d attempted with any real conviction to convince her not to leave. By the time she announced her decision, anyone who knew her well--as well as anyone could really know Joan Watson--knew better than to try. After all, hadn’t the signs been there for a while? The reclusiveness, the flattening affect, the quick and quicker flare and smolder of each romantic relationship. Being suspended from practice had been a catalyst, no doubt, but a catalyst in the chemical sense: an agent which speeds an already-inevitable, inexorable process. This had been bound to happen, they agreed behind closed doors and cupped hands.

And in her heart of hearts--in that small space that flowered only in the final moments before sleep--Joan thought so too. When an attending physician tells you, a medical student in her first gown and gloves, that you have a surgeon’s hands, you don’t look away. And she hadn’t: not for the five years it took to complete residency, or the five years on top of that spent in fellowship, cracking open rib cages, working stitches into the tiniest of blood vessels, repairing and removing human hearts. But the suspension had forced her to look up, and she wasn’t sure she liked what she saw in the mirror when she did.

It had not been a mistake, this life she had chosen. But it had rapidly become one.

\---

They say to avoid making big life decisions in the first year after a major loss. The bereaved are advised to wait before changing jobs, moving house, or altering relationships. In the six months following her suspension, Joan does all three.

Before, she’d been terrified of losing Ty: of being alone and having to start all over again, of disrupting the pretty picture the two of them made. In the end, fitting the ring over her swollen knuckle is the hardest part of leaving.

\---

Joan has long thought that medicine is like a cult: the more of yourself you put into it, the harder it is to leave, even when all signs point to that being the right thing to do. After all, how do you give up something in which you’ve invested so much? At final count, Joan had given a decade and a half to her training. Not including college, with weekends spent volunteering in ERs instead of out with friends. Not including high school, with summers devoted to intensive science camps and lab internships. Not including an entire lifetime holding up the arch of her mother’s pleased, satisfied smile at social gatherings whenever one’s children entered the conversation (“Did I tell you Joanie got into Columbia and NYU for medical school? Yes! Of course we’re very proud...”).

And yet, on the last ferry ride back from Highland Hospital, after clearing out her locker and turning in her badge, Joan finds herself thinking about heat shock--about how cells, under the duress of extreme temperature, become looser and more susceptible to change. To transformation.

She lets her professional association memberships lapse first--the American College of Physicians,the Academy of Cardiology, the Board of Thoracic Surgery. She ignores emails (generic at first, then personalized and alarmed) reminding her to re-up her credentials. The AOA Honors Society goes last--an academic recognition she had pushed herself to mental and physical extremes to achieve in medical school, awarded only to the top 8% of her class. What good is that to her now?

She doesn’t tell anyone when the time to renew her medical license quietly comes and goes.

“I’m not a doctor,” she insists. She puts away her stethoscope, and shreds the last of her prescription pads.

\---

Even so, skills are skills.

As a sober companion, she knows how to handle a patient in withdrawal or overdose--to stabilize airways, monitor breathing, maintain circulation. It saves more than a few clients, and this makes her glad.

In her new-new career, too, her old life serves her. She performs elicit nocturnal autopsies, the scalpel slicing sweetly through skin and fascia. She stitches up Sherlock’s gunshot wounds, monitors his concussions, reduces dislocated shoulders with movements her muscles know by heart.

But so much of what she touches still turns to dust. Jem from Le Milieu dies in spite of her efforts. CPR doesn’t rescue Andrew from suffocating to death on the cafe floor, his diaphragm paralyzed by hemlock meant for her. Her attention to his sobriety doesn’t stop Sherlock from relapsing.

She’d left medicine, hoping that she was leaving the weight of life and death behind as well. And yet, somehow it remained hers to carry, the body count ever-rising. She hadn’t saved anyone by leaving.

She certainly hadn’t saved herself.

\---

Of course, she is still a doctor. Her mind can’t not see what it’s been painstakingly trained to find. And so, when Mary Watson begins to misremember things, she can’t help but notice.

 _It’s fine_ , she thinks, _It’s just aging_. But then Mary gets lost coming home from the grocery store--a route she’s taken for decades--and the alarm bells become deafening, impossible to ignore.

She accompanies her mother to her appointments, peppering the neurologists with questions about prognosis, treatment, clinical trials.

“I’ve read that nasal insulin has been associated with reduced burden of amyloid in patients with mild Alzheimer’s”, she says to one of her mother’s doctors, handing over an annotated copy of a medical journal. The man raises his eyebrows, peering at her from over moon-shaped glasses.

“Are you in medicine?” he asks, surprised, and she falters, thinking of how best to explain herself.

After the third such encounter, she decides she is tired of faltering.

\---

A thick envelope from the American Board of Medical Specialities arrives in the mail. Sherlock bears it into the brownstone and drops it into her lap, his mouth twisted into a small knot.

“Well, Watson,” Sherlock says lightly, “seems you’ve gotten your credentials back. Well done.”

Joan looks up at him, a shadow of suspicion on her face. Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“Obvious from the thickness of the envelope. Only an idiot would have to open it to know.”

Joan slips it open anyway and and fishes out the coversheet, scanning it quickly. _Congratulations, Dr. Joan Watson..._

“At last you can no longer profess--incorrectly, I might add--to not being a doctor,” Sherlock says, his voice receding as he retreats into the kitchen.

Joan runs her fingers over the bottom of the page, where her license and prescribing numbers are listed in bold print.

“No,” she says, with a barely-suppressed smile. “I suppose not.”


End file.
